Once you’ve ground your beans and brewed your coffee, stop yourself from upending the used coffee grounds into the garbage. You can use them to enrich your soil and provide a great base for your flowering plants that includes trace minerals and holds moisture better than some types of soil. Coffee grounds even smell amazing, so you won’t have to hold your nose while you mix them into the soil.
Benefits of Coffee
Coffee grounds help your soil hold moisture, so if you’re having a dry spring or summer, deep watering will stay near the roots of the plants in your garden for longer. Minerals that help feed your plant, including trace amounts of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium, are also found in coffee grounds. They even help with pest control; include some coffee grounds in your soil and the slugs will back away slowly.
One way to determine if your flowers will benefit from coffee grounds in the soil is to check your garden's soil pH with a test kit. A pH of below 7 is acidic. While many plants thrive in slightly acidic soil; no lower than between 6 and 7 is usually best. If your soil has a pH of 7 or higher, adding coffee grounds to the soil can make your garden more hospitable to flowering plants such as Bergenia. No matter the acidity, the soil should also be nutrient rich. To use coffee grounds with non-acidic plants or in soil that’s already acidic, use it in compost with other natural products like eggshells, instead of on its own.
The presence of aluminum in your soil can affect how certain plants, like hydrangeas, grow. If more aluminum in the soil is available to your hydrangeas, they will bloom with more blue color. As the pH decreases, the available aluminum will increase. A pH below 5 is necessary for blue hydrangeas. A compost including coffee grounds introduced to the soil can help. Aluminum sulfate added to the soil will also increase the aluminum available to the flowers.
If you want to give your garden a vitamin boost, try creating a composting bin. It's easy to throw in your garden clippings, weeds, fruit cores, vegetable scraps, tea bags, eggs shells and other organic matter as you find it. When you're ready, the soil can be tilled with your compost to add the extra nutrients you've collected that then feed the plants in your garden. Coffee grounds can be thrown in with other compost ingredients to enhance your soil without being directly added.
Your Planting Articles
- Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty Images